13 ms·

Job Posting for Amazon.com Before it Launched

127 points by capdiz 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
klon 14y ago
But who got the job?
- thinkling 14y ago
  Possibly Paul (Barton-)Davis [1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
- kt9 14y ago
  Shel Kaphan http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl... http://www.linkedin.com/pub/shel-kaphan/0/781/7b6 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/shel-kaphan/0/781/7b6
agumonkey 14y ago
Alan Kay quoted for truth.
- lifebeyondfife 14y ago
  That's a really interesting snapshot of 1990s nettiquette. On Usenet or Email you generally selected a pithy quote for your email footer. The trend went out of fashion I'd say around the turn of the century.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    It does when the mailing public stopped using Unix and mail programs that were smart enough to shell out to external programs to compute the signature. Now we have webmail where only one company decides what programs you cannise to compose mail.
macavity23 14y ago
'extremely talented c/c++/unix developers'... 'able to build complex systems in about one third the time most competent people think possible' This language conveys so much more competence than the standard 'seeking unix ninja rockstar' stuff that seems to be de rigeur these days.
- sspiff 14y ago
  Although if I read that today, I would think the company is being unrealistic and overreaching. Granted, they made it, but this kind of language would not build faith in a company if I were to read a job ad for them. The added Alan Kay quote would further fuel my doubt that the submitter is just another worthless startup guy thinking he can get the best of the best with some shallow knowledge of what hackers think. I would have been wrong this time, but I don't doubt for a second there are hundreds of ads like this for companies that crashed and burned shortly after.
  - adrianoconnor 14y ago
    As a programmer that has occasionally worked in teams that delivered great software in 1/3rd the time that sensible people thought possible, that advert really appeals to me -- to me it sounds like someone who really wants to get stuff done, and that is exciting. Like the GP said, the language in this particular post is interesting -- it feels very different to the usual 'are you a ROCKSTAR NINJA PROGAMMER?!?!?!' stuff that tends to typify the worthless startup guys. That kind of high-performance environment is all about the team, not the individual. Usually it's hard to know who you will gel with until you have some sort of history of working together, then you self select. However, like I say, this advert really appeals to me and could possibly help me get over that pre-selection process in my head.
    - sspiff 14y ago
      I guess I have a more negative worldview than you do. And in this case, I would have been wrong, and you would have been right.
  - 14y ago
Pwnguinz 14y ago
Look at how similar this copy looks to any other SV startups these days (minus some buzz words like "Cloud", "Social", "Disruptive", etc). It goes to show that hiring (well) is hard. Even harder to gauge whether or not a company is worth applying to from the job descriptions alone. Phrases like: "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems" are so vague and ambiguous that if I honestly saw this post from some guy named "Bezos" in '94, I would have written off as a jokester. At least in '94 they haven't started using the word "disruptive" as if it's something you can do to a whole industry overnight. Thank goodness.
- sspiff 14y ago
  I agree, based on this ad, I would discard the company as an overreaching startup founder with a vague idea of how to reach out to developers and destined to fail within the next two years. In this case though, I would have been wrong.
  - RyanZAG 14y ago
    I'd say you shouldn't just write that off as a freak incident though. You should be reconsidering how you read these kind of job adverts - obviously, a company can succeed even with this kind of approach - and it can obviously fail with it. That means that the language or style used to convey a job opening is probably NOT a good indicator of the success of a company. Maybe it's time to rethink prejudices?
    - sspiff 14y ago
      Sure, it's not a good indicator of success, but it generally is a good indicator for what kind of people you'll be dealing with and how you will be communicating with them. Depending on what you want, of course, you should look for different things. I'm not going to make the judgment call on whether a company will be wildly successful - I don't have the background for that. I'll see if they have any chance of surviving and if they do, if it would be a pleasant environment to work in.
  - btilly 14y ago
ern 14y ago
If you are looking for a list of significant USENET posts, including this one by Bezos, go to: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html The list was created in 2001, when Google Groups reconstructed a huge archive of USENET postings.
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  I don't know why exactly, but it's really grating me that people have been replying to them. It may go against the spirit of Usenet but it would have been nice if Google disabled replies in their user interface, or at least filtered the display somehow. It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits. "OMG 30 Years..." - yes mate, thanks for that. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.general/2pZYKaXpS0g/EiwFg5OMPaEJ https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.genera...
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits. I agree with you, but on a fun side-note, I remember climbing the bell tower of a centuries-old church in the middle of nowhere, and being staggered by the amount of Victorian-era graffiti carved in to the walls. I guess that the need to write "TOM WOZ 'ERE" goes back a long way.
    - pivotal 14y ago
      It's funny, new graffiti is vandalism, but old graffiti becomes history in and of itself. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have an entire Egyptian temple that at some point was shipped across the ocean, and to me the most fascinating part of it was the graffiti left by occupying British soldiers long after it was built. Go figure.
  - zandorg 14y ago
    It's time someone setup an alternative usenet archive to Google Groups. The only people to do this were DejaNews.com, later acquired by Google. Then there was the 'look, we recovered all this old stuff off tapes' which is locked behind captchas and against the open spirit of usenet. [edit: the tape archive is available here http://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive http://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive] Perhaps the Internet Archive should archive usenet?
equity 14y ago
Why is the link to this job opening posted so often? I see it every 1 - 2 months here. It's not so interesting to see it posted as often as it is.
- kayoone 14y ago
  regular HN reader here, but i have not seen this posted before.
  - Pwnguinz 14y ago
    Probably because they don't always make the front page. See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845645 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845645 Posted again, today (as of writing, of course).
krmmalik 14y ago
That job posting has taught me so much in just a few paragraphs. Even if I was the founder of a well-capitalized StartUp, I'd have great difficulty in promising people that work for me that we were going to be big. I just don't have that kind of confidence, yet it shows Bezos knew very clearly and intuitively that he was going to hit it big. Sense and definiteness of purpose i think contribute way more to success than anything else. I also think it's interesting to see that Bezos shares similar traits to Henry Ford in that he knew intuitively that it was possible to do certain things that were seemingly against the grain. So much learning. So impressed with that job post, even if i can see the flipside for the candidates assessing that vacancy, since it does seem a little "out there". I do wonder if that technique would attract someone like that today. In my own experience i've found hiring slowly and using non conventional methods for bringing people into a business seem to work quite well, so perhaps the economy has changed on this. Either way, great posting. Edit: spelling/grammar
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > it shows Bezos knew very clearly and intuitively that he was going to hit it big. This is ultra-common with startup founders. They believe unwaveringly in their eventual success, which is why they're founding a company in the first place. Who would choose to be a founder if they thought they'd be mediocre and eating ramen forever? Some are right, some are deluded. Sometimes with the really good ideas, you can only decide which after the fact. For every Bezos there are 10,000 or more guys with the same intuition that failed. Ultimately, that unwavering belief is table-stakes as a founder. It's what gets engineers and lawyers and marketing people to come on board and fight the good fight with you.
werencole 14y ago
I find it odd that this article from two years ago is now No. 3 on Hacker News. :P
- rpm4321 14y ago
  Are you concerned the subject matter will be out of date ;)

127 points by capdiz 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

klon 14y ago

But who got the job?

thinkling 14y ago
Possibly Paul (Barton-)Davis [1]? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Davis_(programmer)
kt9 14y ago
Shel Kaphan http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl... http://www.linkedin.com/pub/shel-kaphan/0/781/7b6 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/shel-kaphan/0/781/7b6

agumonkey 14y ago

Alan Kay quoted for truth.

lifebeyondfife 14y ago
That's a really interesting snapshot of 1990s nettiquette. On Usenet or Email you generally selected a pithy quote for your email footer. The trend went out of fashion I'd say around the turn of the century.
- Evbn 14y ago
  It does when the mailing public stopped using Unix and mail programs that were smart enough to shell out to external programs to compute the signature. Now we have webmail where only one company decides what programs you cannise to compose mail.

macavity23 14y ago

'extremely talented c/c++/unix developers'... 'able to build complex systems in about one third the time most competent people think possible' This language conveys so much more competence than the standard 'seeking unix ninja rockstar' stuff that seems to be de rigeur these days.

sspiff 14y ago
Although if I read that today, I would think the company is being unrealistic and overreaching. Granted, they made it, but this kind of language would not build faith in a company if I were to read a job ad for them. The added Alan Kay quote would further fuel my doubt that the submitter is just another worthless startup guy thinking he can get the best of the best with some shallow knowledge of what hackers think. I would have been wrong this time, but I don't doubt for a second there are hundreds of ads like this for companies that crashed and burned shortly after.
- adrianoconnor 14y ago
  As a programmer that has occasionally worked in teams that delivered great software in 1/3rd the time that sensible people thought possible, that advert really appeals to me -- to me it sounds like someone who really wants to get stuff done, and that is exciting. Like the GP said, the language in this particular post is interesting -- it feels very different to the usual 'are you a ROCKSTAR NINJA PROGAMMER?!?!?!' stuff that tends to typify the worthless startup guys. That kind of high-performance environment is all about the team, not the individual. Usually it's hard to know who you will gel with until you have some sort of history of working together, then you self select. However, like I say, this advert really appeals to me and could possibly help me get over that pre-selection process in my head.
  - sspiff 14y ago
    I guess I have a more negative worldview than you do. And in this case, I would have been wrong, and you would have been right.
- 14y ago

Pwnguinz 14y ago

Look at how similar this copy looks to any other SV startups these days (minus some buzz words like "Cloud", "Social", "Disruptive", etc). It goes to show that hiring (well) is hard. Even harder to gauge whether or not a company is worth applying to from the job descriptions alone. Phrases like: "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems" are so vague and ambiguous that if I honestly saw this post from some guy named "Bezos" in '94, I would have written off as a jokester. At least in '94 they haven't started using the word "disruptive" as if it's something you can do to a whole industry overnight. Thank goodness.

sspiff 14y ago
I agree, based on this ad, I would discard the company as an overreaching startup founder with a vague idea of how to reach out to developers and destined to fail within the next two years. In this case though, I would have been wrong.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  I'd say you shouldn't just write that off as a freak incident though. You should be reconsidering how you read these kind of job adverts - obviously, a company can succeed even with this kind of approach - and it can obviously fail with it. That means that the language or style used to convey a job opening is probably NOT a good indicator of the success of a company. Maybe it's time to rethink prejudices?
  - sspiff 14y ago
    Sure, it's not a good indicator of success, but it generally is a good indicator for what kind of people you'll be dealing with and how you will be communicating with them. Depending on what you want, of course, you should look for different things. I'm not going to make the judgment call on whether a company will be wildly successful - I don't have the background for that. I'll see if they have any chance of surviving and if they do, if it would be a pleasant environment to work in.
- btilly 14y ago

ern 14y ago

If you are looking for a list of significant USENET posts, including this one by Bezos, go to: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html The list was created in 2001, when Google Groups reconstructed a huge archive of USENET postings.

reitzensteinm 14y ago
I don't know why exactly, but it's really grating me that people have been replying to them. It may go against the spirit of Usenet but it would have been nice if Google disabled replies in their user interface, or at least filtered the display somehow. It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits. "OMG 30 Years..." - yes mate, thanks for that. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.general/2pZYKaXpS0g/EiwFg5OMPaEJ https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.genera...
- mootothemax 14y ago
  It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits. I agree with you, but on a fun side-note, I remember climbing the bell tower of a centuries-old church in the middle of nowhere, and being staggered by the amount of Victorian-era graffiti carved in to the walls. I guess that the need to write "TOM WOZ 'ERE" goes back a long way.
  - pivotal 14y ago
    It's funny, new graffiti is vandalism, but old graffiti becomes history in and of itself. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have an entire Egyptian temple that at some point was shipped across the ocean, and to me the most fascinating part of it was the graffiti left by occupying British soldiers long after it was built. Go figure.
- zandorg 14y ago
  It's time someone setup an alternative usenet archive to Google Groups. The only people to do this were DejaNews.com, later acquired by Google. Then there was the 'look, we recovered all this old stuff off tapes' which is locked behind captchas and against the open spirit of usenet. [edit: the tape archive is available here http://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive http://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive] Perhaps the Internet Archive should archive usenet?

equity 14y ago

Why is the link to this job opening posted so often? I see it every 1 - 2 months here. It's not so interesting to see it posted as often as it is.

kayoone 14y ago
regular HN reader here, but i have not seen this posted before.
- Pwnguinz 14y ago
  Probably because they don't always make the front page. See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845645 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845645 Posted again, today (as of writing, of course).

krmmalik 14y ago

That job posting has taught me so much in just a few paragraphs. Even if I was the founder of a well-capitalized StartUp, I'd have great difficulty in promising people that work for me that we were going to be big. I just don't have that kind of confidence, yet it shows Bezos knew very clearly and intuitively that he was going to hit it big. Sense and definiteness of purpose i think contribute way more to success than anything else. I also think it's interesting to see that Bezos shares similar traits to Henry Ford in that he knew intuitively that it was possible to do certain things that were seemingly against the grain. So much learning. So impressed with that job post, even if i can see the flipside for the candidates assessing that vacancy, since it does seem a little "out there". I do wonder if that technique would attract someone like that today. In my own experience i've found hiring slowly and using non conventional methods for bringing people into a business seem to work quite well, so perhaps the economy has changed on this. Either way, great posting. Edit: spelling/grammar

Domenic_S 14y ago
> it shows Bezos knew very clearly and intuitively that he was going to hit it big. This is ultra-common with startup founders. They believe unwaveringly in their eventual success, which is why they're founding a company in the first place. Who would choose to be a founder if they thought they'd be mediocre and eating ramen forever? Some are right, some are deluded. Sometimes with the really good ideas, you can only decide which after the fact. For every Bezos there are 10,000 or more guys with the same intuition that failed. Ultimately, that unwavering belief is table-stakes as a founder. It's what gets engineers and lawyers and marketing people to come on board and fight the good fight with you.

werencole 14y ago

I find it odd that this article from two years ago is now No. 3 on Hacker News. :P

rpm4321 14y ago
Are you concerned the subject matter will be out of date ;)